Margarita Dawson Stelfox

Margarita Dawson Stelfox was born Margarita Dawson Mitchell in 1886 in Lisburn to Elizabeth (née Pounden) and the Rev. George P. Mitchell.[1][2] She studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, the only woman in her class, and graduated in 1908.[2] She spent a year teaching in Waterford before returning to Belfast to take up a post at Victoria College.[2] She continued to teach there part time, once she became a student of botany at the newly constituted The Queen's University of Belfast, from which graduated with honours in 1912, having won the Dunville Studentship.[2]

She joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1909, where she met Arthur Wilson Stelfox—in the year 1911/1912, the pair were listed as the club's joint honorary secretaries.[3] They married in 1914.[4] During their engagement, she was offered a teaching post at The Queen's University, but declined it due to her impending marriage.[2] The couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. One son and their daughter died in childhood.

During World War I the couple worked as fruit-growers in Ballymagee, County Down. They moved to Dublin in 1920, when her husband was offered the job of assistant naturalist in the Natural History Museum there.[5] The family home was on Clareville Road, Harold's Cross. In the early 1920s, with her husband as collaborator, she produced a textbook for primary schools, The National Programme of Rural Science or Nature Study, published by the Educational Company of Ireland.[2] In October 1925, the couple jointly found the first confirmed record of the rare slime mold Diderma lucidum in Ireland, at Powerscourt Waterfall.[2] In 1947 they found the first occurrence of the alpine myxomycete Lepidoderma carestianum in the British Isles, at Ben Lawers; the specimen was not identified until 1965.[2]

He recognised her knowledge, and in 1941 wrote:[6]

That an ant not previously recorded from Ireland should enter the house of one of the few people in the country who would recognise it seems a very remote possibility, yet on the 17th September 1941, such a coincidence happened ... (bringing in the washing after a warm day) my wife found, wrapped in a handkerchief, a small winged hymenopteron, which on examination proved to be a female of the ant.Ponera punctatissima Roger. not previously found in Ireland.

After her husband's 1948 retirement they moved to Newcastle, County Down.[7][8]

She was one of the few Irish botanists of her time who specialised in Mycetozoa. She collaborated with Margaret Williamson Rea, co-authoring at least one paper with her.[9] Specimens collected by the two women form part of the Stelfox Collection in the herbarium of the Ulster Museum.[10] She also corresponded with Gulielma Lister.[11][12]

After several months of illness, Margarita Stelfox died on 13 August 1971; her husband died eight months later.[2]